See something through touch sensor? I don’t understand.
Hello @Yiming_Sha,
Next time, please cite the name of the video and the time mark for the content in question. This one comes from Course 2 Week 1 Video " Is there a path to AGI?" at roughly 6:39.
Before we continue our discussion, I am quoting the following part of the transcript starting around 5:40
Auditory refers to sound, and so this piece of the brain that in most people learns to here, when it is fed different data, it instead learns to see. Here’s another example. This part of your brain is your somatosensory cortex, somatosensory refers to touch processing. If you were to similarly rewire the brain to cut the connection from the touch sensors to that part of the brain and instead rewire the brain to feed in images, then the somatosensory cortex learns to see. There’s been a sequence of experiments like this, showing that many different parts of the brain, just depending on what data is given can learn to see, or learn to feel, or learn to hear as if there was maybe one algorithm that just depending on what data or this given, learns to process that inputs accordingly. There happens systems built which take a camera may be mounted to someone’s forehead and maps it to a pattern of voltages in a grid on someone’s tongue. By mapping a grayscale image to a pattern of voltages on your tongue, this can help people that are not cited line individuals learn to see with your tongue, or they’ve been fascinating experiments with human echolocation or humans sonar, so animals like dolphins and bats use sonar to see, and researchers have found that if you train humans to make clicking sounds, and listen to how that bounces off surroundings, humans can sometimes learn some degree of human echolocation
Please read it or (if the transcript doesn’t make sense to you) watch that part of the video again, let me know your understanding, and we can discuss based on your understanding.
Cheers,
Raymond
I understand the meaning of this, but I don’t know if a blind person can truly “see” this image. Will the image mapped in their mind be consistent with the actual image? Or will there be significant deviation?
Hey @Yiming_Sha,
Check this interesting video and this out, and find more yourself 
I only googled “see with tongue” to find those two, but you can try better keywords.
Cheers,
Raymond
Thank you. I can now understand it doesn’t matter to reflect in the brain the same picture as the normal person. If the reaction is the same, then the effect is the same. Am I right ?
I agree with you. The fact is, I don’t know how image works or how it is reconstructed in brain. The best we can do is to find such a device and try it ourselves, but apparently we do not have it, so the next thing we can do is to find videos like that to see that it can work.
However, based on how the device looks, we can guess how it’s going to work? brighter thing is going to be more sensible on our tongue. Camera’s sensor is 2D and the surface of our tongue is also 2D.
Make sense, you guessed my next question. 
How do we perceive 3D images when we only have one tongue? Can we simulate a binocular camera and then correspond the two sides of the tongue to the left eye and right eye respectively, and then combine them into a stereoscopic image?
Tongue might not be the biggest problem, afterall it is just responsible for sending signals to brain. Camera is the problem, because whatever tongue sees comes from camera and if the camera is only a good 2D visual device, then what can we expect from tongue? You watched those videos? One of them used a 3-camera set and maybe it can make a difference.
I just realized that the video is 16 years ago, which means it shoud be more advanced at today. But I didn’t hear about technology recently.
Do the research yourself
Will you explain this? I couldn’t understand really
The idea is that the camera detects the image and sends the signal to a device. Then, the device transforms the signal into electric voltages on a grid. The voltage grid is put on a person’s tongue, so the tongue can feel the voltage pattern. When the image changes, the pattern changes, and the feeling changes, and the person needs to learn how to “visualize” with this feeling from electric voltage stimulation.
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Thanks Raymond